Pillars
by roulette rouge
Summary: Deep in the heart of Georgia wilderness, the deadly fever strikes hard. She's lost everything dear and familiar to her. He never had anything to lose. Daryl/OC.


prologue.

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I kept running. As far as I could. As fast as I could. And I didn't look back.

I ran from everything once calm and familiar. From the tire swing I'd fallen from when I was twelve and broke my arm when I hit the ground. From the rusty screen door hinges that screamed when you threw them open to let the sun shine in on dusty termite-ridden floors. Far and away from absent fathers, strong silent brothers, and the warmth of a mother's arms long since gone heavy and cold.

Once, they'd been soft, safe when every shape in the dark seemed a danger, and the sound of her voice hummed through the feather light bones in her chest. They were crushed and heavy now. Like stones around my neck. Her eyes were pale and deadened. She was shattered on the floor beside my rotting brother and the shotgun I'd used to put him down. They wore their blood like funeral garments. I left them where they lay and I ran.

The tears on my cheeks hadn't had a chance to dry before the hinges cracked and heavy boots came rumbling inside like uninvited thunder. Hard eyes flashed in the watered down moonlight that crawled through the door behind him. A shadow crossed over them as he bent to take my hand. At first, I'd thought – I'd hoped – he was one of them. An answer to those long hours I'd passed bent over cooling bodies. Long nights I'd spent praying for death.

But he'd put his hand on me, palm cradling my bare shoulder. It was a touch all too human, much too careful to belong to the dead. He'd found me.

"They're comin'."

His voice was just a whisper, hiding from the shadows of death gathering in the room. There were screams outside. Dead things writhed in the underbrush as the smell of fresh spilled blood drew them near. It wasn't the first time I wished I was one of them. Mindless. Soulless. Separate from this pain only the living knew now.

And it wouldn't be the last either.

I was too numb to argue. Too numb to push him away. I didn't care where he took me. If I did, my head was elsewhere, searching for something dear to hold onto. His hand closed around my wrist, pulled me up to my feet, dragged me out onto that front porch that once soaked up hot midsummer afternoons and mama's sweet tea like a sponge. It was gone. All gone. I never had a chance to say goodbye.

He picked up his pace and, blindly, I followed him. Even as my legs ached and trembled and every breath I took burned in my throat like fire. I waited for my heart to give out. For my lungs to burst. I waited for the end to come. I wanted it, prayed for it while he led me through those grave silent columns of trees. Even as he fought to save my life - I only wished he'd end it instead.

I just wanted it to be over.

I just wanted it to be done.

I just…

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We were stereotypes, him and I. Pigeonholed to the bone. It was hard to break out of a mold always meant for us…damn near impossible, even. But I was lucky somehow. God had smiled on me, found me lumbering in the darkness. Our shared existence was such a laughable unkindness. As if our lives had been written by clumsy hands.

Troubled fathers. Distant brothers. Backwoods trailer trash that no one gave a damn about. Any sweet memory we had to our name had been destroyed by alcohol and tragedy. We wore the trademarks of troubled homes in torn clothes and fresh bruises. Everything about us screamed textbook. We were nothing more than redneck trash.

But where I found salvation and a fresh start following the death of my so-called father, he found only loneliness and despair.

Often I would plead his case to my mother. She would only turn up her nose at him when we often caught him roaming our lands in search of food. _Please, _I'd beg, pulling on the hem of her skirts in my desperation. He was nothing more than skin hanging from sunken bones. All sharp angles and hungry flesh. I watched him sift through our blackberry bushes, his cold eyes huge and bulging. I couldn't understand how she could watch him struggle from the sidelines. Let him crawl through the dust on all fours like an animal – the way she had under the malicious boots of my father. She should have felt compassion. Pity. The need to save him.

Anything but the coldness I saw in her every time she looked at him. There was nothing. Nothing at all. It was as though she turned to ice at the sight of him.

Mother wouldn't budge, even as she counted the clear outline of his ribs with some measure of acknowledgement. She saw how he suffered, how he shouldered that suffering with the heavy grace only a pariah knew how to bear. Because once, not so very long ago, she had carried it herself. She knew how the weight pulled on you like an anchor. And yet she would not save him from the same fate….a reluctance I could never understand.

He was that_ troubled kind, _she'd often tell me, and she'd turn him away in the same manner she would the rodents who went through our garbage at night. With the handle of a splintered old broom.

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I did as much as I could for him. For the longest time, we had shared each other's pain. Offered wordless comfort when we could find none in anyone else. There had been an understanding. An unspoken sympathy between us. When at last I had escaped my own fate, I felt guilty somehow. As if, when God had at last answered my only prayer, I had so willingly abandoned my friend to the cold comfort of shadows. I spent the last fifteen years of my life trying to find a way to make it up to him. I left care packages of my brother's old flannels and peanut butter sandwiches in the secrecy of a hollowed-out oak tree. When I would look up at the bowed figure of Christ on his cross, I would have only one request to offer up to him – _please, save him. Save him the way you saved me_. It had been enough, then, when I owed him only the sympathy of a guilty soul.

However could I repay him now?

Now, when I owed him my very life.

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At last, Daryl Dixon had stopped. His chest was bare and heaving, and with each rise and fall the moonlight would catch the pigment in his thin stretched skin – casting glimpses of pearly shadows over the bones beneath. I could smell the earth on him, the blood, and I knew he'd been running and killing for days. He had that wild look I remembered – the kind he'd get when he'd show up with a sunburn and a full belly. _Hunting._

He set to work quickly – slamming doors, killing lights, setting up makeshift deadbolts and covering all windows quickly with raw planks of wood. I sat in the middle of the room. Still numb. Skin still jumping like a livewire from all the confusion; I could feel the imprint of the callus in Daryl's hard-worked hands bristling against my wrist. The memory of my mother's cold fish eyes staring through the back of my head. A scream had been slowly building up in the pit of my stomach since the night my brother died. I'd bottled it up in hopes that it would go away, but it just kept building and building, higher, like it would never stop swelling up in that deep dark place I'd squirreled it away. I felt bloated. Like some hot putrid balloon. Rising up out of my body, but still attached to it somehow. Even as I balled myself up, buried my head between my legs and tried to breathe, the feeling never dissipated – the feeling like I was going to explode.

.

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I rocked back and forth as Daryl tore through the room. A one man hurricane. Swift and quick and devastating. He ripped pictures from walls, nails from their beds. He hammered and pounded and pillaged that small abandoned hunting cabin until it was dark as pitch, no moonlight stealing through the cracks. Still gasping for air, louder now in utter blindness, I felt him fall to his knees at my side. Hot air brushed against my legs. The smell of blood and earth became overwhelming.

"Abra." He shook me, gently. I was glass in his hands. "Abra, you bit? You hurt? Let me see you..."

He gropes for open wounds in the dark, finding nothing and sighing secretly in relief. "Quiet now. You gotta be quiet. Like church mice," he murmurs clumsily into my hair. "Not a sound...not a sound."

He was trying to calm me, but I could hear the tremors in his own voice. I reached for him, his warmth, the concrete structure of his body. Anything solid to hold onto. Anything safe.

They couldn't see us and we couldn't see them…but they could still smell us. Smell our fear breaking in waves across the desolate ground outside. It was like radar, drawing them in, promising blood; they knew we were in here. And they would not stop until they got to us.

The doors rattled on their hinges. Fingernails raked through the seams in the wood. They surrounded us. The air rattled with screams and groans and snarls, as if a pack of wolves had begun to circle around our door. There was no escape. Nowhere to turn, to run – _we were_ _trapped. _

Suddenly, without warning, the scream I'd kept inside for so long bubbled up into my throat. I couldn't stop it. I screwed my eyes shut, pulled the tattered remains of Daryl's vest into my fists and let it come.

Daryl shouted over the clamor. Over my voice that ripped like paper. Over the demons that raged outside. _Shut the hell up! Shut up! You'll kill us both!_

Even as he cursed me, he held me tight against his chest. I felt his hands tangle in my hair, the callus snagging in the strands.

He was afraid. _Daryl_, the pillar of undaunted strength…he was _afraid_.

* * *

everything except for my original character belongs to robert kirkman and frank darabont.


End file.
